Sandra Birdsell, author of The Russländer, will read from her new novel entitled Children of the Day at Conrad Grebel University College on Sunday, September 18 at 7pm. The reading, which is free of charge, will take place in Grebel's Chapel.
In Birdsell's new novel, Children of the Day, she has created
an indelible, life-affirming portrait [of the marriage of Sara Vogt,] a Mennonite immigrant stifled by a bloody family history and the secrets and propriety of her people, [and Oliver Vandal, a man] troubled by his own ghosts and longings, [that include his nostalgia] for his Mentis heritage.
Children of the Day
unfolds over the course of a single day in June 1953.
Sandra Birdsell won wide acclaim, including a Giller nomination, for The Russländer. Michael Ondaatje called her
one of our best writers;
Alice Munro has praised her stories for their vitality:
she has the energy, the faith, the skill to make her stories overwhelm us.
In this novel, according to Miriam Toews, author of A Complicated Kindness,
Birdsell beautifully illuminates the age-old tensions between and within the Mennonites and the Metis of Manitoba. [Toews draws particular attention to] the defiant yet vulnerable voices of the Vandal girls, who are caught in the centre of their parents' strife.
Sandra Birdsell is the daughter of a Russian born Mennonite and Mét is father who met in Morris, Manitoba, at the Scratching Chicken hotel. As her website reports,
Her mother worked at the hotel as an upstairs maid, and her father worked downstairs apprenticing as a pool shark, and barber.
Birdsell grew up in a large family in Morris and later settled in Winnipeg, where she raised three children of her own. She now lives in Regina.
Birdsell's reading in Waterloo is part of a promotional tour that will take her, also, to Ottawa, Toronto, Hamilton, Winnipeg, Regina, Saskatoon, Calgary, Edmonton, and Vancouver.